Lal Bahadur Shastri

Biography

Lal Bahadur Shastri was born in Mughalsarai in 1904; his father died when he was a baby and he grew up in his maternal grandfather's household. In January 1921, months before his final school examinations, he left school to join Gandhi's non-cooperation movement. He studied at the newly founded Kashi Vidyapith, graduating in philosophy and ethics in 1925 with the title Shastri, and became a life member of the Servants of the People Society, which he later led. During the independence struggle he spent nearly nine years in British prisons.

After independence he became minister of police and transport in Uttar Pradesh, and in 1951 general secretary of the All-India Congress Committee, running the party's election campaigns. Nehru brought him into the union cabinet as railways minister in 1952; he resigned in 1956, taking responsibility for two serious train accidents. He returned as commerce minister in 1959 and was home minister from 1961 to 1963.

Chosen to succeed Nehru, he became prime minister on 9 June 1964. He backed the dairy co-operative movement and created the National Dairy Development Board, promoted higher food-grain production, eased the 1965 anti-Hindi agitation in Madras by promising that English would stay in official use, and in 1964 signed an agreement with Sirimavo Bandaranaike on the future of people of Indian origin in Ceylon. He led the country through the 1965 war with Pakistan, when his slogan 'Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan' became popular.

At a summit in Tashkent arranged by Alexei Kosygin he signed the Tashkent Declaration with Ayub Khan on 10 January 1966, formally ending the war, and died there of a heart attack the next day. The circumstances of his death have remained a subject of suspicion.